Bullseye framework by Gabriel Weinberg Part 1 - How to get traction for your startup
As Peter Thiel says in his book Zero to One:
It is very likely that one channel is optimal. Most businesses actually get zero distribution channels to work. Poor distribution—not product—is the number one cause of failure. If you can get even a single distribution channel to work, you have great business. If you try for several but don’t nail one, you’re finished. So it’s worth thinking really hard about finding the single best distribution channel.
But what is the one optimal channel that works for you? Bullseye framework is intended to help you find that.
A loop of three steps
Step one: Outer ring, what's possible
- Outer ring is all about brainstorming and to help you counteract your traction channel biases (your experience & what the crowd says);
- Brainstorming every single traction channel:
- At least one idea for every channel:
- Advertise offline, where the best place to do it?
- Give a speech, ideal audience?
- One decent channel strategy that has a chance of moving the needle (What a channel strategy is);
- What would success look like in each channel?
- Research to feed your brainstorming:
- Should get much more specific to your company;
- What marketing strategies have worked in your industry;
- History of companies in your space:
- How similar companies acquired customers over time;
- How unsuccessful companies wasted their marketing dollars.
Step two: Middle ring, what's probable
- Promote the best traction channel ideas to middle ring and run cheap traction tests:
- Sort the traction channel ideas by excitement and promote them one by one until a drop-off in excitement (usually occurs around the third channels);
- Have ideas in multiple channel so you can test them in parallel:
- Can run multiple experiments at the same time because tests take some time to run after setup (Online tools);
- But pick only one channel strategy for one traction channel;
- But too many things in parallel lead to lack of focus. Number of tests need to be somewhat low.
- For each traction channel idea, construct a cheap traction test to see if good or not. Test should be designed to roughly answer:
- How much will it cost to acquire customers through this channel?
- How many customers are available through this channel?
- Are the customers getting through this channel the kind of customers that you want right now?
- One caveat though. Don't prematurely scale your marketing efforts for a channel. This step is to determine if it's a channel that could move the needle for your startup. Main point is speed and get data and to prove your assumptions.
Step three: Inner ring, what's working
- Focus solely on the ONE / CORE channel that will move the needle:
- If one of the traction channels tested in middle ring produced promising results, start directing all your traction efforts and resources toward it;
- One traction channel dominates in terms of customer acquisition at any stage in a startup's life cycle. That's why focusing one at a time.
- Goal for step 3 is squeeze and twist every bit of traction out of the core channel:
- Experiment continually to find out exactly how to optimize growth in the channel, i.e., effective effective strategies & tactics:
- To optimize your chosen channel strategy to make it the best it can be:
- e.g., targeting blogs, tweak which blogs to target, type of content to push and CTA in the content or SEM, tweak keywords, ad copy, demographics, and landing pages.
- To uncover better channel strategies within the same traction channel:
- Run cheap and fast testing and answer the same basic questions as middle ring tests to see if there is a better channel strategy you should be using within the core channel.
- Scale the efforts until no longer effective due to saturation or rising costs:
- All marketing channels become saturated over time, happening with all channel strategies. Tactics that once worked will become crowded and ineffective;
- To combat this reality, should consistently brainstorm new channel strategies and conduct small experiments to find an untapped channel strategy in an established venue or trying a venue no one else is using.
- Don't get distracted by marketing efforts in other traction channels showing promising results, albeit much less so (tendency to try more on them). This is a mistake. Core channel needs efforts to uncover additional strategies and tactics to have greater effect;
- Sometimes to scale a core channel, you need supports from other channels. But you should still be focusing on that one core channel and execute its strategy instead of pursuing multiple traction strategies at once.
- If no channel seems promising after testing, the whole process should be repeated.
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